It’s hardly Huxley vs Wilberforce, but perhaps there is something to learn in observing a recent debate between Richard Dawkins and Piers Morgan. Piers, trading as ever on common sense, is incapable of coming to terms with “nothing”, and the inadmissibility of the question, “What came before the big bang?”
Professor Dawkins tries his best to remind his interrogator that this is really a question for a physicist, not an evolutionary biologist. But why not also question of philosophy, that great grandfather of the academic sciences?
Unable to even entertain the prospect of there being no “before” the origin of the universe, Piers’ god-shaped hole is the one he has shot into his own foot, given that his protestations might just as well be directed at his timeless, spaceless deity.
The rest of the world gets this soon, but you, as ever, may have it early.
